THE EARLIEST LOCAL FLORA. 
II 9 
predecessors and contemporaries were simply a little too con¬ 
servative in their ideas of the limits of a genus, or they would 
have segregated this from Aconitum as a good genus; a proposi¬ 
tion which came, at length, from Boerhaave at the time when 
Linnaeus was a very small boy. 
A little further on two pages are devoted to listing and describ¬ 
ing the Harcynian species of Alsine; a name that was as good as 
lost to botany during the nineteenth century, but which has now 
got back again into use instead of that interloping name Stellaria. 
Of the five binary names for Alsine species, the second is A. media , 
a name of late grown familiar again. It is now, however, attrib¬ 
uted to Linnaeus, who was of a later date by more than a century 
and a half, and who himself never claimed it as other than an 
adopted name from earlier authors. 
Page fifteen of the catalogue is occupied almost wholly by the 
description of a new genus; and I have a vivid recollection of 
the thrill of pleasure I experienced, now a dozen or fifteen years 
since, when I first read the paragraph descriptive of his new genus 
Alsinanthemum, and saw clearly by the first reading that this 
could be no other than what we know as Trientalis. The account 
he gives of this little denizen of moist shades, with its slender 
stem a span high, with leaves mostly near the summit, from amid 
which rise several very slender pedicels each bearing a milk-white 
star-shaped flower, these succeeded by capsules of the size of a 
coriander or smaller, each with several black seeds enveloped in 
a membranous inner covering,—and his remark that in a former 
year he had sent a botanical friend seeds of it as those of a new 
genus which he had then proposed to call Asterianthemum in allu¬ 
sion to its perfectly star-shaped corolla—all the page pictured, 
not only one of my favorite plants most lucidly, but also told the 
story of long experience of careful and scholarly study on the part 
of that writer, and his ability to create a diagnostic representation 
of a plant, without trace of that pedantic formalism now grown 
so common as to be often considered indispensable to descriptive 
botany. 
The book contains a considerable number of species, described 
as new, as well as three or four other genera beside Trientalis. 
